resistance, recuperation, and perpetual complicity--it is
also, along another frontier, a limit of cultural
visibility itself, and serves as a launching stage for the
ballistic invention of the sub-ject, one cast beneath the
reach of critical illumination. The familiar logic of
encoding and decoding out of which so much of the semiotics
of the stupid underground is generated itself encodes the
primacy of the secret. Indeed, one becomes an
"agent"--these days, a virtual synonym for the cultural
subject--by one of these two transformations of the factum.
One is either employed in the manufacture of cultural signs
or presumes to decode their ideological truth; one either
encodes the ideolect of the counter-culture or interprets
it for the knowledge industries. We have never deviated
from the argument that these two modes are interimplicated:
the stupid underground, like every presented mode of
resistance, functions as secret, encoded cell partly
through the decoding and circulation of "information"
encoded by the conspiracies it projects; and it is by this
very means--and with the help of critical agency
itself--that its secret marginality is economically
recoded. But we must imagine, in reading the Loompanics
catalogue, for instance, that there are former artists and
writers who have sent away for and taken seriously these
how-to books on disappearance, on false identity, on
survival without participation in the main chance; who are
fasting to burn off cultural toxins and, even though they
will never be entirely "free" of all discourse, have
disappeared from "our" screens and hence pose a peculiar
threat to critical industry as such. We might even take
the stupid underground as a sort of decoy, a particularly
blank marker for other sorts of communication and secrecy
that are not visible in the least: the stupid underground
is a sacrificial goat, offered up to us, pretending to be
the real secrecy, while another, deeper refusal explores
the smooth space of an exteriority entirely hidden and
still entirely within the boundaries of daily life;
deep-cover agents who, even as earlier avant-gardes pursued
experiments in the form and content of art, engage in what
one might call an "experimental economy" in which the very
status of discourse and its modes of circulation are
reconstructed. The conspiracy is the secret withheld from
the observer; so too we conceive the stupid underground not
as the site but as the threshold of another secret; we
conceive it here in order to project a depth, a sub-stance,
a becoming-imperceptible that will ruin us,